Lost Pages

It used to be summer when Christmas came round.  Underneath tall southern skies over sun scorched ground. With the backyard cricket, the barbies, the beach, and munching on mangoes to watch the Queen’s Speech. The slathering of sunscreen, the glorious glare And toasting the glow in the warm evening air. It used to be summer when I was young. A golden age in a land far flung. But there came a point, I crossed a divide, went up in the world and summer had died. December is dark now, the nights close in. So we huddle together as kith and as kin. It’s winter now when Christmas rolls round, We celebrate still though with different surrounds. We mull the wine and strike the matches, Light the fires, batten the hatches, Gather around the warming beam Of family love or a TV screen. So safe inside, no place to go, we toast marshmallows and let it snow. Our summer’s gone, if you’ve been around, you’ve felt the fall: life’s run aground. We’ve gone up in the world, seen summer die. So what’s o...

Robin DiAngelo has a sermon to preach. It is in form of a short popular book called White Fragilit y. Straight off the bat she tells us not to expect balanced analysis but a forceful argument “unapologetically rooted in identity politics”.  She understands identity politics as “the [political] focus on the barriers specific groups face in their struggle for equality”. The group she wants to save is black people, whom she blankets under “people of colour”.  So what is White Fragility about?  DiAngelo is sick and tired of white racism in the western world, and specifically the USA. She believes every white person, including babies, are guilty of racism by virtue of being white. So she wants to use her “insider status” as a white American woman to challenge this white racism by getting her fellow “white progressives” to force forward her thesis. In her words, “I am white...and I am mainly writing to a white audience”. I was immediately tempted to put down the book because be...